"Human language is like a cracked kettle drum on which we
beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make
music that will move the stars to pity." --Gustave Flaubert

Descartes, I've heard tale: On the night before you published your treatise, Rules For The Direction Of The Mind,
you dreamed: Walking a city street, you found yourself leaning so far
to the right, that, as you proceeded along the sidewalk, your head and
body were positioned almost parallel to the ground " er " excuse me, but
can we talk about this, Rene'?

Shortly thereafter, you insisted that: Dreams were as dead as dust--and
proclaimed animals are machines, neither worthy of names nor worth
consideration, other than for commodification.

Instead, can we collaborate on a dream in which we create a legacy in
lasting air so that we might chronicle the world before us"its ceaseless
proliferation and its ceaseless culling--its ever-present laugh of
triumph and elegy without end?

Amid this: Rene', we are, like you, so baffled by who we are in
relationship to the world, it is difficult to meet life head on "
verities buffeted, we are blown, this way, then that " upended,
directionless in a landscape of veritable regret and fleeting revelry "
regardless, we trudge on.

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Did wielding the cutlery of glinting certitude banish trepidation, as
you cut down opaque existence and evanescent identity to manageable
bits?

Yet ensnared in the algorithms of the machine mind, days are denuded " night is banished.

The bee-loud grasses have been rendered mute as the buzz of Predator Drones rises.

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Dualist mind, enchanted by your mastery of things you deem dead, you
have bred seething clouds of black flies infesting Cartesian
slaughterhouse holding pens and bequeathed to us dying oceans and
endless wars waged from vast distances by bloodless technocrats within
cubicles.

Because you averred that the only way to know ourselves is to mince the
living and the dead into tiny bits, I was trained to rip myself asunder
and serve my lifeless heart to my betters.

You--frenzied maenads turned wine-to-blood, reductionist clinicians--that
is my head in your hands--worse, that is the dream body of the world you
have torn to tatters.

Yet the ashes of your charnel house aspirations hang in air like
musical notes " and, like all night music, will dissolve into earth at
dawn.

Thus you and I must keep reminding ourselves to weep for the things of
this world that suffer; otherwise, we mistake the earth's impersonal
dreaming for our own.

Adjust your body back to the left, Rene', face forward, meet the world's gaze at eye level, and more might be revealed.